June 18, 2012

HHhH

by Laurent Binet
336 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review by Marc Nash

Laurent Binet may just have invented a new
genre: meta-historical fiction. Or as he says, he is writing an
"infranovel", a below the novel as it were, with nuggets about how he
the author comes by his source material and his doubts about the whole process of
historical representation. He is the historian fretting about missing pieces in
his evidence. The novelist concerned with writing about real life people and
events and misrepresenting them in the name of fiction. What he does do I
believe, is lance the conceit once and for all that there really is or could be
a genre called historical fiction. Rather there is merely fiction set in the
past, which let's face it, is all fiction. Since even if a novel starts out as
contemporaneous to the author, it soon isn't.

The real life history at the heart of this
novel is the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich "The Blond Beast",
"The Butcher Of Prague", by two members of the Czechoslovak
resistance parachuted in from London. Maybe fortunately for me, I was familiar
with this episode in history. Let the games begin then...

I said this was meta-fiction, less for
references to how Binet comes by his material and continually runs it by his
girlfriend, more because as the novel crescendos, he is there willing the
assassins Gabcik and Kubis on, standing side by side with them,
unapologetically hoping some of their heroism and moral rightness will rub off
on him. He has entered their minds, but morally rather than historically, since
he admits he doesn't know at any moment whether they were smoking a cigarette,
or whether they swapped a kiss with their sweethearts. Any novel is or ought to
be all about the psychology and emotion of its characters. History is anything
but. Academic historians warn us against psychoanalysing historical figures as
'bad history'. That Stalin and Hitler were both 'nutcases' doesn't really join
all the dots behind the consequences of those two tyrannical regimes upon huge
swathes of the global population. And that is before allowing for all the gaps
the historical evidence leaves behind. We may have letters and documents, but
fortunately in most cases we don't have the case notes of shrinks.

HHhH is also meta since Binet can't
help express his exhilaration and trepidation on acquiring new source material.
The exhilaration is axiomatic; the trepidation is that some new book or other
will obviate the need for his own magnum opus. Which of course no book could
ever do, simply because of his framing device of self-insertion. The book has
no page numbers, only 257 bite-sized chapters as another nugget of the jigsaw
may or may not be popped into place. Talking about a stray dog adopted by one
of the conspirators, "The dog probably won't have a decisive role to play
in Operation Anthopoid, but I would rather jot down a useless detail than risk
missing a crucial one".

Yet Binet's bite sized chunks don't
differentiate between the significance, or even the validity of any of their
juicy morsels. Occasionally Binet doubts the verisimilitude of something he
happens upon, or his own way of expressing something as fact, but the reader is
utterly left alone to make up their own mind. Is this history? Is this fiction?
Beats the hell out of me and I studied the former to degree level and now
practise the latter as my profession. As the author says, "I keep banging
my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see growing all over it-
ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy - the unmappable pattern of
causality". There are too many characters involved, many of which he
apologizes for not having the wherewithal to turn into 'characters' to allow
the reader to remember their names. And even where the central actors are in
the spotlight, the records remain too incomplete to flesh them out properly. Binet's
achievement is to represent the 'unmappable' as just that and yet to suggest a
thread through the labyrinth for the reader to follow and access some
coherency.

And so I apply my riddle to sift through
each chapter Binet presents me with. Encouraged by the author to take the
details with a pillar of salt along the entirety. And yet still a striking
portrait of the Nazi regime emerges. Their cruelty and insanity. Their weak
spots- the immediate manhunt after the assassination attempt suggests how
incompetent and frankly cowardly the SS were. The pre-war history of the region
is lightly but effectively sketched in. And finally there is Heydrich himself.
For all the author's disclaimers, this is a highly credible portrait of the man
responsible for putting Hitler's urgent but vague pronouncements of genocides
into practice. Heydrich was the bloodless bureaucrat without rival in
conceiving practical solutions to expedite inhuman policies, but then also the
man who delighted in making tours of his handiwork, unlike his immediate
superior Himmler who was turned queasy by the result of his directives. By the
end of the novel, you the reader have little option but to share Binet's cheerleading
for the two assassins. And such a flagrant lack of neutrality means this could
never be history, but only a novel. A passionate and emotional one at that.